One of my colleagues recently sent me this link. It’s a promotional video for San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, featuring several celebrities and high-powered business people endorsing the appointed incumbent in his election campaign.

Which led me to say, “What the heck?! I’d like to know how/why all those people got involved with that.”

The end of the video gives a clue. Under pictures of bonus footage of Brian Wilson doing “the Hammer dance” and will.i.am staring intently into the camera, the screen states:

Paid for by SAN FRANCISCANS FOR JOBS AND GOOD GOVERNMENT, supporting Ed Lee for Mayor 2011, with major funding by Ron Conway and Sean Parker. Not authorized by a candidate or committee controlled by a candidate.

Ron Conway is a venture capitalist. In fact, he’s one of the tech world’s biggest seed funders.A recent Business Insider profile called “The Scariest Man in Silicon Valley” gets its title from the sheer amount of power Conway wields over whether companies succeed or fail. Sean Parker is a high-profile trendmaker. He was the face of Napster, an early contributor to Facebook, and Justin Timberlake played him in the movie “The Social Network.” Conway and Parker seem to be something of a Mr. Inside/Mr. Outside combination. Kingmakers. And for some reason they evidently really want to see Mayor Lee stay in charge of San Francisco.

Celebrities rarely make promotional videos for free. I don’t know if MC Hammer and will.i.am like Mayor Lee so much that they just decided to donate their time and fame to his campaign. I do know that Davaran and Wilson capitalized on the San Francisco Giants’ success last year by making commercials, like this one. I also know that Mayor Lee helped broker the payroll tax break that made Twitter the anchor business on San Francisco’s mid-Market corridor. And I know that Mayor Lee’s campaign has been able to raise a lot of money very quickly … enough for his supporters to, in part, distribute an “unauthorized biography” door-to-door as, perhaps, history’s heaviest campaign flier.

While unusual, and arresting, none of this is particularly surprising. In my experience there are three tried and true things that help win elections: incumbency, money, and connections. The bottom line is the person who has the best ideas, motives, and leadership seems to be of secondary importance when it comes time for people to punch the ballot card. Commercial manipulation simply has too much power.

Mayor Ed Lee may or may not be the best candidate to run San Francisco. His track record in public service and his leadership in office have been appreciated by many beyond the tech, sports, and entertainment worlds. I’ve met him and spoken with him at length – you can hear our conversation here (and a shorter version here) – and it’s clear that he is very knowledgeable about the city and has plans for its future development. That’s part of why it’s so frustrating to see the full-force political razzle-dazzle in this campaign. It’s unmatchable by other candidates (interviews available here) who don’t have similarly deep-pocketed supporters, even if their ideas are equally worth hearing.

Until that playing field is leveled, we’ll find celebrities and sports stars doing the work of the wealthy to convince us to vote their way. That is not how democracy should be conducted.

You can hear Ben Trefny’s interviews with all 16 candidates for mayor of San Francisco Tuesday and Wednesday at 5pm on KALW’s Crosscurrents.

Last night, demonstrators along the Embarcadero in the Occupy San Francisco movement faced off with police clad in riot gear. An organizer shouted to demonstrators, “”These are the magic words. Everybody repeat after me: I have the right to remain silent.” The group shouted back: “I have the right to remain silent.” She continued: “I want to see a lawyer.” They responded: “I want to see a lawyer.” No arrests were made…

Across the Bay, the Occupy Oakland general assembly voted for a general strike on November 2nd with a total count of 1484 “yeahs” out of 1607 votes. By 7pm last night, the fence around Frank Ogawa Plaza keeping protesters out had been torn down, with protesters chanting, “Whose park? Our park!” Police kept their distance…

Proving nothing is like a good vote, the Oakland School Board voted a little bit themselves last night – specifically, voting to close down 5 Oakland schools. This move is said to save 2 million dollars. A crowd of 500 parents, teachers, and children who were present were not happy, to say the least, when the 5-2 vote came in. One speaker made reference to Oakland Unified taking a bullet to the head, which led Oakland board members to ask if that was a threat. Goodbye Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell Park, and Santa Fe elementary schools…

But all is not woe in the Oakland Unified School District, because at some schools, students are provided free breakfasts in their classrooms. Well, okay there’s some woe … a lot of woe… because a main reason students are fed in school is because, otherwise, they might not be fed at all. 70 percent of public school students in Oakland now qualify for free or reduced-priced meals at school…

In another attempt at good news, let’s go to California prisons. Hundreds of California inmates locked in segregation units, such as those held for decades at Pelican Bay State Prison’s windowless Security Housing Unit, might have their big break and the opportunity to go to more comfortable prison cells. Currently, officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation are planning to review the files of every prisoner.

Before giving lawmakers his plan for pension changes, California governor Jerry Brown wants to make sure we understand his intentions. In a letter to his fellow politicians, the governor expressed that the state must reform its pension system in order to be equitable and sustainable

Legislators on Capital Hill are also dealing with the sustainability of another troubled entity: Solyndra. Members of a state commission ((there was a)) unanimously voted to lift a month-long suspension of an alternative energy-related tax credit that was imposed upon the solar panel company…

Tax exemptions and extensions abound in the state, but the popular “millionaires tax” is finding an unexpected critic in the California Teachers Association. The largest teachers union in California believes that a tax on those making $1 million or more will not create enough revenue, And might actually turn voters away…

Elsewhere in Sacramento County, realignment is getting off to a rough start. Officials claim that the majority of nonviolent offenders that have been sent to the count’s prisons have serious criminal backgrounds. Such labels are not longer considered accurate…

While the state implements it’s prison realignment plan, California voters are considering replacing the death penalty with life in prison without parole. Signatures are being gathered for the initiative, which is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Office of Social Ministry for the Catholic Diocese, NAACP, and others.

Another measure that voters will have a say in is medical marijuana. After the federal crackdown on dispensaries, advocates of medical marijuana are proposing statewide oversight of the medical marijuana industry.

In two weeks San Franciscans will be voting for their next mayor- and the fight between candidate Dennis Herrera and frontrunner Ed Lee, is getting dirty. Herrera has been accused of opposing same-sex marriage, which Herrera claims is a bold-faced lie…

The past 13 months have been difficult for California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Last year, a new lethal injection facility was built in San Quentin. The state spent just over $800,000 building it in response to the allegation that it’s method of lethal injection was cruel and unusual punishment.

Fast-forward to May of 2011: The U.S. Supreme Court ruling to decrease the prison population led to the creation of a coordinated shift of prisoners to county jails, a plan called realignment, which just recently kicked into gear. The plan, in essence, is the largest prison overhaul in the department’s history.

In July and October of this year, the CDCR faced another crisis. Prisoners staged hunger strikes at Pelican Bay State Prison that spread to 13 facilities and involved over 6,000 inmates. All were protesting harsh prison conditions in the state’s highly restrictive security housing units.

In the middle of all these unfolding events was the man who oversees operations for the CDCR. Or he did, that is, until retiring just last week. Former CDCR Undersecretary Scott Kernan’s last day was this past Friday. He was second in command at the department, overseeing all of the facilities and institutions including 33 adult prisons in the state.

In full disclosure, Scott Kernan happens to be related to KALW’s News Director, Holly Kernan. The former undersecretary left his post after almost 30 years working in California corrections. A few days before he retired, reporter Nancy Mullane sat down with Kernan to discuss how he got interested in working with prisons.

* * *

SCOTT KERNAN: My mother was an employed for the prison so actually I lived in the ground of San Quentin before I got employed here, for probably 10 years or something like that. So, that was my upbringing was within the prison and living on the grounds of the prison, knowing the lifers and death row sentence inmates who had their sentences commuted and were running the shuttle buses up through the grounds of San Quentin.

NANCY MULLANE: What was it like to live there as a kid?

KERNAN: It’s just a place to live, I mean, it’s a community, you know. They have houses for employees because of the high costs here in Marin County. So it’s just a place as a recruitment tool to bring staff and my mom happened to be a employed of the department so we had house on the grounds. It was much like a regular place to live, the only difference was that you had to show an ID card coming and going through the gate.

MULLANE: When you told girls, “Come on over to my house, I live in San Quentin”… I always wondered about that!

KERNAN: I think it was an incentive actually, it could might have helped me. You know having a face for radio – it was a unique thing to get people come and check out San Quentin.

MULLANE: Did people actually come?

KERNAN: Sure, you can bring guests into your residence and look at the grounds. My window overlooked the big yard of San Quentin, so it was always interesting when there would be shots fired. Back in those days it was a lot more violence at San Quentin than there is today. But every time shots would go off me and my siblings would run to the window with our binoculars to try to see if we could figure out what was going on.

MULLANE: Was it an “us versus them” system – in other words, the people who were on this side of the wall versus… Did you see yourself as, “Here we are, we are the people who live and work here,” but then there’s all these other people who are incarcerated there?

KERNAN: I think there’s always been, and even today there’s the “us versus them” mentality. I think it’s changed a lot, certainly it has changed for San Quentin which is now a lower-level of facility and doesn’t have near the violence. And you see it, having worked at many different locations you can almost gauge sthat culture by the amount of violence that’s at that particular facility.

When I first started at San Quentin in 1983 it was a lot like that. There was a lot of violence, a lot of serious inmate/staff riots. And so the staff band together, and I think that creates that culture.

MULLANE: So, did you grow up in those teen and early impressionable 20s – what did you think about prisoners?

KERNAN: You know I spent some time… we had inmates that would do the grounds of our house, they run the shuttle that would take you all through the grounds, so I mean I literally knew some of the inmates when I grew up. I think there’s a stereotype often about inmates in the general public…

MULLANE: What is that stereotype?

KERNAN: Just that they’re bad people, scary, that they’ll kill you before they’ve looked at you. Right or wrong, intelligent or not, I think there’s that stigma and that was long not a stigma once you start to talk to people and listen. And in my 30 years in the department I certainly learned that to be the case. Talking to inmates and understanding their situations puts a human face to it, and you quickly loose that stigma of the criminal that I think is prevalent in the public.

* * *

Scott Kernan also represented the CDCR in negotiations with the Pelican Bay State Prison hunger strike organizers. In the second half of this interview, Kernan discusses how the CDCR responded to their demands.

* * *

KERNAN: We dealt with the Pelican Bay Prison hunger strike non-traditionally in that we didn’t take the canteen out of the inmates’ cells, so we left them with the food that they can purchase through the store. We didn’t discipline any of the inmates. We evaluated their domains and it was very public. Our house wasn’t in order. We had some problems with our policies. They had gone too far.

MULLANE: What polices had gone too far?

KERNAN: Well some of it’s conditions of confinement, and the SHU (Security Housing Unit) policy itself – you know we have about 8,000 incidents of violence in the prison system each year that have some kind of gang involvement. I mean it’s a lot of people getting hurt and stabbed. Gangs, I can’t emphatically enough say, is one of the biggest problems that the prison system faces.

We really took a sincere look at the issues that they had raised and we talked to their advocates…

MULLANE: Who’s we?

KERNAN: Me. I talked to the advocates regularly…

MULLANE: So you went to Pelican Bay?

KERNAN: I did, ultimately, go to Pelican Bay on two occasions and talk to the inmate leaders directly and admitted policies that weren’t in order. We weren’t consistent in all the SHU’s and so they were right in some of their issues. And when I say conditions of confinement, that’s one thing, but the SHU policy itself, the idea of using a validation system that places them in an indeterminate SHU environment.

MULLANE: Do you think it’s a form of torture?

KERNAN: I don’t. I really think that the type of inmates that belong in SHU, notwithstanding what I said about over-validating, I think that the people that are the head of these gangs are a tremendous threat to the staff and public and to other inmate, and need to be in an environment that’s admittedly harsh, but prevents them from communicating their wishes.

We’ve actually had three murders in the last couple weeks, but two of the murders were on SHU yards amongst Aryan brotherhoods. In all of my career I’ve seen significant violent and murders as a result of gang direction.

So what we said we would do in the first hunger strike, we said we’d made a number of changes to the conditions of confinement and it included everything from giving them calendars and watch-caps and take a photo once a year if they’re behaving…

MULLANE: Of themselves?

KERNAN: Of themselves, so they can give to the families. And other things. So we’ve implemented those changes system-wide.

The other thing was we said that we would do a comprehensive review of our SHU polices and that we would make changes…

MULLANE: Were you the one who took the secretary’s confirmation of these changes to the hunger strike leaders at Pelican Bay?

KERNAN: Yes.

MULLANE: And what was their response?

KERNAN: Um interestingly, very positive. I went there the first time and talked to them, and put out some memorandums that outlined these changes – memorandums to the CDCR policies so that the wardens at the other places could implement it.

So I went back because they were not ending the hunger strike, I went back a second time, and I sat down with them and they said, “Hey the memo that you did doesn’t say exactly what you said you would do.”

So this is what I did, I gave them the memo and I put them back in the holding cell and said, “You guys go rewrite this memo so that you know that all the inmates will understand it, and I’ll be back in a little bit.”

MULLANE: What did you do?

KERNAN: Went to have lunch. (laughs) I went and had lunch and I knew that the risk was that they would change the memo to say that I want a swimming pool and whatever they were going to want. The risk was that they were going to take this… because again there’s this very healthy distrust that they have of me, and there’s a very healthy distrust I have of them and their motivations. But again that was the fear, so I was pleasantly surprised when I came back from lunch and they had reworked the memo and had not appreciably changed what I said. So it was just a communication barrier.

So I took the memo, typed it up, signed it, gave it to them, and we distributed it across the system and that was the end of the first hunger strike.

MULLANE: What was the reaction throughout the CDCR? Did people think, “Oh, that worked. That was good.”

MULLANE: So you didn’t get a bunch of backslaps when you got back to Sacramento?

KERNAN: No. I think they view that – and again for a lot of good reasons – they view that kind of communication, especially with the leaders that we’re talking about, I mean these are the leaders of the prison gangs that lack real family, the Mexican mafia, Nuestra Familia, the Aryan Brotherhood – these are not nice people. So for us to recognize their status, one, and to actually engage them in communication to try and see if there’s common ground that we can move was not something that I think operations people will ever feel is necessarily the right way to go about it.

And to their criticism, the inmates quickly resumed the second hunger strike without good cause in my opinion. And I think emboldened that idea.

MULLANE: We haven’t talked about the fact that you’ve announced your resigning.

KERNAN: Retiring.

MULLANE: Retiring!

KERNAN: There’s a distinction in my world that’s very big! I’m retiring. I’ve had a long career as a correctional employee and I’m retiring at 50 years old, and 30 years in service you can retire at 90% of your salary.

MULLANE: Ninety percent, for the rest of your life?

KERNAN: Correct.

MULLANE: So nice. But you’re 50 years old, you’ve got a whole life ahead of you!

KERNAN: I hope so. It’s taken a lot on me, though! It’s been tough. Truly, the penchant’s really the product of a very strong union that recognized the difficult, stressful environment that peace officers especially work in in the correctional system.

MULLANE: Can I ask you if you support the death sentence, death penalty?

KERNAN: Personally?

MULLANE: Personally. You don’t know?

KERNAN: I do know, but I don’t know as undersecretary that my personal opinion… I’ve just spent the last 30 years including the last seven in a very high position within the department. And my personal belief on the death penalty is irrelevant, really.

MULLANE: What if I told you this interview wasn’t going to air until after you’ve retired?

KERNAN: I think that the death penalty and the legal costs are pretty prohibitive. I have 710 inmates on death row right now. The governor, as a result of the budget situation, made an early-on call not to build a new facility that would appropriately house the condemned inmates. And for a lot of those reasons and knowing what I know about the tough situation that San Quentin has to handle with the condemned, it’s hard for me to be real supportive at a personal level.

MULLANE: So what now?

KERNAN: That’s interesting, I really don’t know at this point.

MULLANE: You don’t?

KERNAN: I think I’ll stay involved in some way. I think the current secretary is a great guy, Matthew Cate – very dedicated, smart guy that’s done a great job. But should he ever decide to move on, because it is a non-doable job, you never know…

MULLANE: Are you saying that you would like to be secretary of the CDCR?

KERNAN: No, what I’m saying is if that opportunity came up, it would be a very competitive process, but you know… if it was a possibility in the future, I sure wouldn’t rule it out. I love the department; I’ve done it all my life, and I’ve worked with great people and see what they go through on the line, and I’d love to take a shot at trying to run this undoable job sometime in the future.

But having said that, let me go decompress for a little bit and when they come after me when this airs, I’ll say, “Forget that, I’m enjoying my golf game!” So who knows.

Nancy Mullane is an independent reporter and producer based here in the Bay Area. She won the Edward R. Murrow award for her radio documentary, “Life After Murder,” which tells the story of San Quentin inmates as they serve life sentences.

For more information about the future of California prisons go to our criminal justice blog, The Informant.

Police in San Jose have cleared out the overnight Occupy encampment, but some protesters remain around the clock, by climbing to places where the long arm of the law won’t bother to reach…
In spite of Occupy protests, presidential hopefuls are still … …

This just in from Africa: After four decades of rule and brutal war over the past months, Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed as fighters took over his hometown of Surt, according to the interim government. It’s not yet clear how he died, but… …

From a young age, many of us dream of the houses we’ll own. But those dreams don’t get into the reality of how much houses cost. These days, buying a house means getting a mortgage – which can wind up taking decades to pay off. And that’s if you keep from defaulting – defaults in the Golden State are more than double the national average.

JAY SHAFER: When you look at events like the housing bust – which eventually caused a worldwide economic downturn – you know, people were being forced into more house than they could afford.

When Jay Shafer says “more house,” he means it literally – as in, they were just too big. Shafer owns the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, based in Graton, California.

SHAFER: The banks wouldn’t give loans for houses that were small … These things are really very much a part of what caused this economic downturn, and yet nobody talks about it.

In recent years, Shafer’s become the face of the “tiny-house movement.” It’s a diverse spectrum of people who live in houses that are so small, they’re often illegal. Yes, there’s such a thing as a house that’s legally too small.

So what has driven some Bay Area residents into such tiny quarters? KALW’s Jon Atkinson reports.

* * *

JON ATKINSON: Walt Whitman wrote that “a man is not a whole and complete man unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on.” I’m thinking of those words as I pull up in Graton, for a tour of Jay Shafer’s latest tiny-house.

It’s just seven-by-fourteen feet – so small, it violates current housing codes. That’s one of the reasons it’s mounted on a trailer-bed: Housing regulations are really extensive, but trailer regulations are practically non-existent.

JAY SHAFER: Stepping right inside the front door, to the left side we’ve got the kitchen, which is very small – just about four-and-a-half or maybe four feet long… To the right side of the front door, there is the bathroom, which is probably the smallest full bath in the world – as far as I know, anyway…

Shafer’s a practiced salesman: He’s given Oprah Winfrey and Anderson Cooper similar tours. The New Yorker calls him “the brainy misfit behind the tiny-house trend,” and he’s definitely the closest thing the movement has to a celebrity.

Shafer often says there’s something “luxurious” about living simply: It frees you up to do what you actually enjoy, since you’re not constantly working to pay for a lot of stuff you can’t afford.

SHAFER: It’s really about buying less and living with less – living with just what you need to be happy, rather than a bunch of extra stuff.

So, there’s a philosophical reason to go small. But for others…

STEPHEN MARSHALL: …It’s more a pragmatic solution to economic and personal need than it is a change in lifestyle of “now I don’t want so much.”

Stephen Marshall owns a business in Petaluma called Little House on the Trailer.

MARSHALL: I get a fair amount of walk-in traffic, because we’re sitting here on the highway in a used car lot. So people notice, and everybody’s sort of enchanted by the idea.

Marshall says that when many of these people come through, they talk about trying to use less, or be green.

MARSHALL: That’s all the idealistic narrative around little houses. None of those people, not one of those people, out of, say, 30 houses that we’ve sold now, has been a buyer.

His clients are more practical. Many of them buy his houses for their elderly parents. That’s where economics kicks in.

On average, you’ll pay about $2,500 a month to move your parents into an assisted living facility. But for around $6,000, Marshall will build you a little house, and you can park your parents in the backyard, and take care of them yourself.

Marshall’s clients aren’t worrying about saving the world. They want their immediate needs met, at the best price.

BILL GLANTING: It’s sort of reminiscent of a little ship’s cabin. And I’ll close the door. And it’s nice and airtight and cozy and warm. And you look up here, we’ve got a skylight…

Bill Glanting built a tiny house in his backyard in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood. One of his sons moved home after graduating from UCLA – he kept sending out resumes, but couldn’t find a job. At the same time, Glanting’s younger son also decided to move home, from Davis.

GLANTING: I was not about to say, “Well too bad, you’re old enough, go out and get a job,” or something, because that really wasn’t a viable solution. You know, I’m not gonna turn my sons out in the street. But we needed more room.

Glanting’s main house is already pretty small by many people’s standards: It’s 1,000 square feet. He built his backyard cabana himself, for somewhere between $2,000-3,000. It’s an addition – a guesthouse. But others are actually moving full-time into smaller places.

Brenda Daugherty and her partner, Cece Reinhardt, recently moved into an Airstream – one of those vaguely retro, silver-bullet-type trailers. To do so, they’ve had to downsize to meet strict limits – their overall weight can’t be more than 15,000 pounds.

BRENDA DAUGHERTY: We come back from being weighed, we bring in the scale, and we start putting stuff on the scale. “Okay, that’s three pounds of wool curtain, that’s coming out … an extra pair of scissors, and a pot and a pan, that’s eight pounds – take it out!”

CECE REINHARDT: So we shaved 88 pounds in two hours, and we’re very proud.

It’s not a tiny-house – they’d like one of those in a few years, maybe – but they’re definitely engaging in some tiny-living. The trailer is 25 feet long – 160 square feet.

REINHARDT: It took us living in excess many years, kind of the California dream, where we thought we were supposed to each have a car, and we had a big house… It took several years of that and then looking at our bank accounts each month and our savings each month and our retirement and going, “Yeah, this isn’t exactly where we wanted to go.”

Slowly, they started to downsize. They got rid of things they hadn’t used in a year, and sold their big house to rent a smaller place. They’re debt-free now, and have begun to save money.

DAUGHERTY: I think it was a bit of a kick to my ego to actually admit that you don’t need all this stuff, and this stuff isn’t what you thought this stuff would bring you.

Talking to Reinhardt and Daugherty, it strikes me that their reasons for downsizing have a lot in common with Henry David Thoreau’s. In the 1840s, he moved into his own tiny-house, an experience he described in Walden, where he wrote that “the cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

How does my stuff influence the life that I live? How much of my life will I spend paying for that stuff – and how do I actually feel about that?

These are the questions tiny-housers are asking. They’re big ones, and have to do with the meaning of life itself. So it makes sense that, to answer them, these people have started by rethinking the places they live.

For Crosscurrents, I’m Jon Atkinson.

Could you permanently live in a tiny house? What are you doing to cut back during this difficult economic times? Let us know on our Facebook page.

There are 16 candidates in this year’s San Francisco mayoral race, including two city supervisors and a state senator. There’s an educator, an entrepreneur, and an entertainer. The city’s public defender, city attorney, and assessor recorder. A t… …

BAY AREA BOOK WORLD BREAKING NEWS
Occupy Main Street!
Now that Occupy Wallstreet has landed in the Bay Area, it’s about time for someone to start an Occupy Main Street movement. And we should therefore begin with a brief statement from an anonymous m… …

Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts submitted his letter of resignation Tuesday. Effective next month, Batts will depart as the city’s top cop after being on the job since 2009. In his letter Batts claimed to have “limited control, but full accounta… …